Working People: 2 words have different implications

Posted: Tuesday, May 01, 2001

"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.''

George Bernard Shaw

The first definition for 'accountability' in my dictionary is 'responsibility.' The first definition for 'responsibility' in my dictionary is 'accountability.' Not very illuminating. If your dictionary blurs this line, too, you may wonder why we started discarding 'responsibility' and making every aspect of work an 'accountability' some years back.

I submit that these two words have different behavioral implications, and if we ever hope to gain clarity on issues like workplace or schoolyard violence, quality improvement, education, customer service, teamwork and ethics we will have to look harder and deeper at these two terms.

Let's start here. 'Responsibility' fundamentally means 'able to respond.' To be responsible for something usually entails having the authority to act independently.

When I was a deck officer in the Navy, I stood many watches in the dead of night with my superior officers fast asleep in their cabins below. While functioning as the officer of the deck I was in literal command of the ship. True, the commanding officer was to be instantly notified if anything happened that might jeopardize the ship or his professional reputation in any way, but the fact remained that when I gave an order to anyone else aboard while I was performing that duty it carried the exact same authority as if the captain, himself, ordered it.

The logic was simple. Someone had to be able to respond instantly to certain events. A man falling overboard, for example, called for certain immediate steps to recover him. The officer of the deck initiated all the actions to locate and retrieve the man and to begin a head count to determine who it was that went swimming. To wait for a groggy C.O. in the middle of the night was to needlessly risk a life.

These 'responsibilities' of officers were, and still are, well understood before anyone is allowed to perform this role. Most of the requirements were written, some were customary, a few were specific to the particular commanding officer involved, but these responsibilities all shared something in common: The obligation to respond was absolute, and there was always sufficient authority to go with it. Beyond these specific responsibilities there was another more imprecise landscape, the area of accountability.

Let's define 'accountability' as 'the ability to account for' something. Accountants know this term well. To account for money involves many specific rules and procedures applied to a tangible commodity, and the importance of sound accounting is regarded as essential to any enterprise.

But in human behavior 'accountability' is extremely mercurial, and without a clear map of what makes somebody 'accountable' it's easy to get disastrously lost.

Accountability begins with accounting for ourselves. Once we master accounting for our own behavior we are in a position to account for the behaviors of others.

We have seen recently a tragic and compelling application of this principle. The U.S. submarine that recently surfaced under a Japanese ship off Hawaii is emerging as an object lesson in accountability. In performing this 'emergency blow' maneuver the commanding officer was responsible for many things, chief among them being a periscope search of the immediate vicinity before conducting the exercise to make sure he was alone.

But beyond that 'responsibility' he was also accountable for everything else that contributed to the safe execution of the maneuver. That means making sure that those members of his crew whose 'responsibilities' involved sonar search of the area were also performing properly. As we learn more about this incident, it appears likely that one or more members of the crew who had an affirmative duty to inform the captain of a ship nearby did not perform.

Yes, there were civilians in the control room. Yes, there were civilians at the ship control stations. Yes, they were late starting the exercise.

And yes, it's still the captain's fault.

More on this next time.

Greg Sagan is an Amarillo-based business consultant and writer. He can be reached by e-mail at gtsagan@tcac.net.